October 1, 2011: The Battle of the Brooklyn Bridge

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On the rain-soaked morning of October 1, 2011, the couple hundred protesters camping out in a concrete park in Lower Manhattan and calling themselves Occupy Wall Street were a ragtag army of young revolutionary dreamers, whose declared war against corporate greed and appalling income inequality was mostly ignored by the media and struggling to get any traction with America’s battered middle class. By nightfall, the Occupy Wall Street movement had captured the national imagination – exploding onto the front page and sparking a wave of protest in all 50 states. This is the remarkable story of the tense few hours that changed everything: “October 1, 2011: The Battle of the Brooklyn Bridge.” In this instant history, you’ll see the dramatic showdown between marchers and a wall of New York Police Department officers, resulting in 700 arrests, through the eyes of the everyday Americans who lived it – an idealistic and daring college radical, a salty-tongued retired Vietnam-era lawyer on a quest for social justice, the shy theatrical props manager taking part in his first protest, and many more. “October 1, 2011” goes behind the headlines to show a miscalculating NYPD struggling to protect the status quo, to reveal the improbable sparks touching off a new American revolution, and to relive the life-altering choices faced by average citizens trapped inside a police “kettle” as a damp darkness descended on the Brooklyn Bridge. But most importantly, it recasts the Occupy Wall Street movement as a struggle over something even more fundamental than economic injustice: A yearning by ignored and unheard Americans to simply reclaim the public square – the battle that came to a head on a Saturday afternoon high atop the most famous bridge in the world.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Will Bunch is senior writer for the Philadelphia Daily News – where he writes the popular political blog Attytood – and a senior fellow with Media Matters for America. He shared the 1992 Pulitzer Prize for spot news reporting in 1992 when he was at New York Newsday. His books include The Backlash: Right-Wing Radicals, High-Def Hucksters and Paranoid Politics in the Age of Obama, and Tear Down This Myth: The Right-Wing Distortion of the Reagan Legacy. His articles have also appeared in the New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, Mother Jones, The Los Angeles Times, American Prospect, American Journalism Review, and elsewhere. He lives in the Philadelphia suburbs with his family.